When Manoj Night Shyamalan was growing up in suburban Philadelphia in the 1980s, his parents--both immigrants from India, both physicians--piled on the pressure. "There was simply an assumption that I'd come first in my class," he recalls. He was also expected to follow his parents into medicine. When he told them he would instead study moviemaking at New York University, they were horrified. Now they feel a lot better. In 1997, five years after his graduation, Walt Disney Studios paid Shyamalan $2.5 million for the screenplay of the Bruce Willis thriller The Sixth Sense and let the young writer direct the...